Family Photos and Blurred Memories

Photographer Jarod Lew attunes his camera to the Asian American experience. Rather than the flattening effects that monikers such as “Asian American” can have, Lew’s images build complexity and depth by visualizing moments in the daily lives of his family and community. Often situated in domestic spaces, Lew’s intimate portraits of people and place connect across personal and communal histories that are revealingly underrepresented or misunderstood within broader socio-political contexts.Lew completed his MFA at Yale University School of Art in 2024 and has produced several notable photo series, including Please Take Off Your Shoes (2016–21), which was shortlisted for the Aperture Portfolio Prize in 2021 and was featured in the 2023 group exhibition Kinship: Photography and Connection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His most recent body of work, Mimicry (2022), was featured alongside several existing projects in Strange You Never Knew (2025) at the University of Michigan Museum of Art—marking the artist’s first major solo museum exhibition.Taking an intergenerational view and approach, Lew links the past and present through depictions that do not always provide easy access to those in front of or behind the camera. In this way, he synchronously contends with the limits and possibilities of imagemaking and the enduring legacies of how photography both empowers and exploits racialized subjects. Ultimately, Lew’s practice challenges the concept of the photograph as a document. Instead, he queries the instability of images as records of memory and meaning and invites us to read between the lines. The following conversation, which took place on November 14, 2025, via Zoom, endeavors to reveal Lew’s process for producing images as a keen observer of the periphery.